Style Guides

How to Use the Style Guide

That's from another site of mine called Project SRO. It sort of petered out at some point.

I like Mid Century Modern design. I also like Art Deco. There's I think seven posts with the label styleguide and one labeled ArtDeco.

My interest in doing the style guide kind of petered out. I spoke with a trained architect who extremely politely and respectfully clued me I'm a clueless twit and "Mid Century Modern skyscrapers" basically don't exist.

It's an Asian influenced style from the post war 1950s that birthed the modern suburb. It's almost entirely suburban style buildings.

You can potentially invent a new concept of Mid Century Modern flavored buildings of several stories but there aren't a lot of historic examples of buildings over one story in the Mid Century Modern style and I was wanting to figure out how to create a style guide for a downtown of mostly two to four story buildings.

I know a lot more about clothes than about architecture. I know from studying fashion that style is strongly influenced by things like booms and busts.

Streamline Moderne emerged in the 1930s and the Wikipedia page says extremely nice things about it and emphasizes how it mimicked modern airplanes or something but the reality is its minimal ornamentation is rooted in the existence of a global Great Depression. 

It's not really a style about creative expression or what people thought was beautiful. It's a style arising from a harsh situation with which people were coping as best they could.

Both Art Deco and Mid Century Modern are post war designs that occured during eras of relative prosperity for the general public and with unusually good defacto women's rights and both are before the car ate the world. And both are attractive, associated with relatively small homes and small pieces of furniture.

I did some research and concluded I don't really want to look further. If you are trying to revitalize a mixed use, walkable historic downtown and don't want to, say, scream "We are dirt poor and looking to The Great Depression for inspiration!", you should probably be looking to either Art Deco or Mid Century Modern for suggestions on how to unify the downtown and make it look more cohesive.

I have only one color scheme listed. I had planned to do a couple of posts on color schemes, one for Mid Century Modern and one for Art Deco. Most small towns probably should just look to Mid Century Modern if they are distressed and looking to something like the Main Street America program for some hope of fixing their downtown. 

Art Deco is fancier and more colorful. If your town is a little more monied and more touristy, that might make sense as your chosen style for a style guide.

I don't personally see any reason to write up a dozen different guides for a dozen different architectural styles. I feel like you can write up some general information on what shapes and details are typical of these two styles and add some color schemes to pick from and be done.

I've already done part of that. I don't see why small towns across America should waste a lot of time reinventing the wheel here.

You don't need a Main Street program to do this. Put it to a vote at city council and add a one page note to the city website. Use my style guide or Google up something or just list the architectural style and pick a color scheme typical of the architectural style in question.

Just remember: Guidelines are NOT strict rules. This is intended to help make your town more attractive for minimal time, money and effort, not be a new reason for people to fight about stupid stuff.